The first offering from my Long Island of the Mind album, “Noon Hill,” is about a place in Medfield, Massachusetts. It’s a reservation, dirt roads leading out to woods where we used to go and drink beer, smoke pot, and listen to music on car stereos. It is about that push-and-pull of the past and the present that I mentioned in the About: Long Island of the Mind Album section. You can download the file here. Right click/Apple click, “save as.”

It is the most recent songs I have written. I got an email from a friend, read a sad news story, and it was one of those rare songs that just spills forth all at once.

Again speaking of the push/pull of the past, I remember another news item, in the celebrity sightings page of the paper years back, that noted that Martin Scorcese was spotted having a meal at a place called the Noon Hill Grill in Medfield. It blew my mind. It is just a tiny little town of around 10,000 people, a one- or two-stoplight town. And here is this guy whose movies I grew up on, hanging out in Medfield. Eating at a fancy restaurant. Named after the place we used to go hide to drink beer. The highest quality eatery we had when I lived there was a Friendly’s Restaurant, a place that inspired the Buffalo Tom song “Sodajerk.” The only other notable thing about Medfield at the time was that it had a forbidding hulk of an old state mental hospital, where some of my friends worked, and many outpatients of which used to come to Friendly’s and request such things from me as, “MORE COFFEE FOR HERE PLEASE, BILL! MORE COFFEE. FOR HERE. BILL! MORE COFFEE. FOR HERE.” It is a place where my younger schoolmate, Hurricane Peter McNeely once came in riding a post-school-dance wave of Medfield High’s Mobnoxiousness, took a few looks at me behind the counter, decked out in my utterly ridiculous houndstooth blue-and-white-checked polyester uniform and paper sodajerk hat, and asked, “Janovitz, you work here?” Twice in a row.

This institution, by that time mostly vacant, was what drew Scorcese to Medfield, scouting for locations for his film of the Dennis Lehane novel, Shutter Island.” As far as I understand, he did indeed end up using the hospital.

He reportedly also shot up on Noon Hill.

Photo from MedfieldPatch.com

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